The Gelati Academy

The school of higher learning David IV attached to his monastery of Gelati — the academy that contemporaries called “a new Hellas” and “a second Athos,” a center of Neoplatonic philosophy, patristic theology, and the sciences that gathered the leading Georgian scholars of the age, among them Ioane Petritsi, translator and commentator of Proclus, and Arsen Ikaltoeli, translator of the dogmatic Fathers; and the intellectual heart of the Georgian Golden Age.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Royal Academy

Gelati was not only a monastery but a school. David founded, alongside the monastery, an academy of higher learning — a studium of philosophy, theology, rhetoric, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and the sciences — and gathered to it the most learned Georgian scholars of the day, many of them drawn home from the Georgian monastic learned centers abroad (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014, on the Gelati school; en.wikipedia.org, “Gelati Monastery,” on the academy and its scholars). The near-contemporary and later Georgian sources praise the academy in the highest terms, calling it — in the phrases that have become proverbial — “a new Hellas” (a second Greece) and “a second Athos” (or, in some renderings, another Athens/Jerusalem), meaning that David had brought home to Georgia the sacred and philosophical learning of the Greek Christian world (en.wikipedia.org, “Gelati Monastery,” giving the epithets “a new Hellas” and “a second Athos”; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). [Disputed: the exact epithets — the sources and modern renderings variously give “a new Hellas,” “a second Athos,” “a second Athens,” and “a new/second Jerusalem”; the sense in every case is that Gelati was hailed as the transplanting of Greek Christian and philosophical learning into Georgia.]

The academy was the intellectual expression of David’s whole project. Just as the reformed Church (Section 04) gave his kingdom a purified religious order and the standing army (Section 02) a reliable military one, the Gelati Academy gave it a learned culture of its own — the foundation of the literary and philosophical flowering of the Golden Age (see The Dawn of the Georgian Golden Age).

The Roots: Georgian Learning Abroad

The Gelati Academy did not spring from nothing. It was the homecoming and crown of a century of Georgian intellectual life cultivated in the great monastic centers outside Georgia: the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos (founded by Georgians in the late tenth century), the Georgian houses of the Black Mountain near Antioch, the monastery of Petritsoni (Bachkovo, in Bulgaria), and the schools of Constantinople such as the Mangana academy. In these centers Georgian monks had for generations translated the Greek Fathers and the philosophers into Georgian and absorbed Byzantine learning (Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014, on the Georgian learned tradition abroad; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the translation movement). David’s achievement was to give this dispersed learning a royal home in Georgia itself, drawing its scholars to Gelati.

Ioane Petritsi

The most celebrated philosopher associated with the Gelati circle is Ioane Petritsi (c. late 11th–early 12th century), the outstanding Georgian Neoplatonist. Petritsi is famous above all for his Georgian translation of, and extended commentary on, Proclus’s Elements of Theology (the Stoicheiosis theologike), the central text of late-antique Neoplatonism — a work that made the systematic Neoplatonic metaphysics of the One and the divine henads available in Georgian, read within a Christian framework (Alexidze, in Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014, on Petritsi and his Proclus commentary; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on Petritsi). Petritsi’s Christian-Neoplatonic synthesis is one of the high points of medieval Georgian thought, and his work embodies exactly the fusion of Hellenic philosophy and Christian theology for which Gelati was praised as “a new Hellas.”

Petritsi’s precise biography and his connection to Gelati are, however, debated. He is variously reported to have studied and worked at the Mangana academy in Constantinople and at the Georgian monastery of Petritsoni (Bachkovo) — from which his epithet “Petritsi” may derive — and to have spent his last period teaching in Georgia. [Disputed: whether Ioane Petritsi actually taught at the Gelati Academy, or whether he is associated primarily with Petritsoni/Bachkovo and the school of Ikalto and only traditionally linked to Gelati; his dates and the exact places of his activity are reconstructed with difficulty, and modern scholars differ on the details (see the discussions in Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014). What is secure is that Petritsi belongs to the same royal-sponsored philosophical revival of which Gelati was the center.]

Arsen Ikaltoeli

The other great name of the circle is Arsen Ikaltoeli (Arsen of Ikalto, d. early 12th century), the theologian and translator who is especially associated with the school of Ikalto in Kakheti (eastern Georgia) — another academy of the period, sometimes paired with Gelati as the two great Georgian schools of David’s age. Arsen is celebrated for his Dogmatikon, a great compilation and translation of the dogmatic and polemical works of the Greek Fathers (including anti-heretical and anti-Islamic texts), which furnished the Georgian Church with a systematic theological library and armed it for doctrinal controversy (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on Arsen Ikaltoeli and the Dogmatikon; Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014). Arsen worked under David’s patronage and is one of the scholars whose gathering the sources associate with the king’s foundation of the academies (en.wikipedia.org, “Gelati Monastery,” naming Arsen Ikaltoeli among the scholars David assembled).

The pairing of Petritsi and Arsen — the Neoplatonic philosopher and the patristic theologian — captures the two poles of Gelati’s learning: the daring engagement with Greek philosophy (Proclus, the Neoplatonic tradition) held together with the firm grounding in the dogmatic Fathers. It was a learned culture at once bold and orthodox, and it is one of David’s most consequential legacies (Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014).

The Fruit of the Academy

The Gelati (and Ikalto) academies formed the intellectual soil of the Golden Age. The high philosophical and literary culture that produced, two generations later, Shota Rustaveli’s epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin under Queen Tamar (see The Dawn of the Georgian Golden Age) drew on the learning David had planted. Gelati remained a center of Georgian scholarship and manuscript production for centuries, and its academy is remembered as one of the first and greatest institutions of higher learning in the medieval Christian Caucasus (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Nutsubidze, Horn, and Lourié, 2014). That a king who spent his life at war also founded the nation’s great school is not the least of the reasons he is called the Builder.

See Also

References

  • Georgian Christian Thought and Its Cultural Context, ed. Tamar Nutsubidze, Cornelia B. Horn, and Basil Lourié. Leiden: Brill, 2014. (The Gelati school; Ioane Petritsi and his Proclus commentary; the debates over Petritsi’s biography; Arsen Ikaltoeli; the Georgian learned tradition abroad.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Petritsi; Arsen Ikaltoeli and the Dogmatikon; the translation movement.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The academy and its place in the Golden Age.)
  • “Gelati Monastery.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelati_Monastery. (The academy; the epithets “a new Hellas” and “a second Athos”; Ioane Petritsi and Arsen Ikaltoeli among the assembled scholars.)